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Taking attribution theory as an overarching framework, the study aims to examine how employees attribute and respond to a colleague's approach crafting.

Two complementary studies, including a scenario experiment (Study 1; N = 114) and an online survey (Study 2; N = 220), were conducted to test the hypothesized model.

Study 1 found support for the attribution of a prosocial motive to approach crafting, which in turn led to more social support and less social undermining among observers. This mediation was stronger when the job crafter was perceived as less other-oriented. Study 2 replicated the findings of Study 1 and further showed that when observers attributed both high impression management and prosocial motives to approach crafting, the positive relationship between their prosocial motive attribution and social support for the job crafter got weakened, while the negative relationship between their prosocial motive attribution and social undermining of the job crafter was strengthened.

The findings demonstrate that approach crafting gives rise to specific attributions and reactions toward the job crafter, which enrich the understanding of the social consequences of job crafting in the workplace.

This study investigates when and for whom job crafting may turn into job quitting. The authors hypothesize that approach job crafting relates more positively to turnover intentions and subsequent voluntary job changes among employees with (a) high (vs low) need for career challenges and (b) those with high (vs low) self-esteem.

Data were collected from 575 employees of a large public organization in the Netherlands with two measurement moments three months apart. Hypotheses were tested using cross-lagged regression analyses and path modeling.

Supporting the hypotheses, approach crafting related positively to an increase in turnover intentions only among employees with high need for challenge or high self-esteem. Moreover, via turnover intentions at Time 1, approach crafting related positively to the voluntary job change at Time 2 for employees with (a) high need for challenge, as well as those with (b) high self-esteem. These findings held after controlling for avoidance crafting.

This study has been conducted in a relatively homogenous sample. Future research may test the predictions in a more heterogeneous sample, including participants from different cultural and economic contexts.

The authors advise human resource (HR) professionals to facilitate the job crafting efforts of employees with a high need for challenge and those with high self-esteem because these groups are particularly at risk of voluntarily quitting their jobs. Adopting insights from the wise proactivity model may help ensure that job crafting benefits both employees and employers.

This study brings clarity to the inconsistent relationships between job crafting and job quitting by using the wise proactivity model as an explanatory framework.

Leader secure-base support, consisting of leader availability, noninterference and encouragement of growth, has important implications for stimulating employee proactivity. This study is aimed at examining whether, why and when leader secure-base support may motivate employees to engage in approach job crafting behavior. Drawing upon regulatory focus theory, we propose leader secure-base support is positively associated with employee approach job crafting via employee state promotion focus. Based on cue consistency theory, we further examine the moderating role of organizational learning culture in the associations of leader secure-base support with employee state promotion focus and subsequent approach job crafting.

Two-wave data were collected from 281 Chinese workers. Path analyses with Mplus 7 were conducted to test the hypotheses.

As predicted, we found that leader secure-base support was positively related to employee state promotion focus and, in turn, facilitated employee approach job crafting. Moreover, organizational learning culture accentuated the impact of leader secure-base support on employee job crafting process.

This study is the first to examine the influence of leader secure-base support on employee job crafting. It also identifies a boundary condition for such an influence.

In celebration of the 25th anniversary of the founding of Career Development International, a state-of-the-art overview of recent trends in job-crafting research was conducted. Since job crafting was introduced twenty years ago as a type of proactive work behavior that employees engage in to adjust their jobs to their needs, skills, and preferences, research has evolved tremendously.

To take stock of recent developments and to unravel the latest trends in the field, this overview encompasses job-crafting research published in the years 2016–2021. The overview portrays that recent contributions have matured the theoretical and empirical advancement of job-crafting research from three perspectives (i.e. individual, team and social).

When looking at the job-crafting literature through these three perspectives, a total of six trends were uncovered that show that job-crafting research has moved to a more in-depth theory-testing approach; broadened its scope; examined team-level job crafting and social relationships; and focused on the impact of job crafting on others in the work environment and their evaluations and reactions to it.

The overview of recent trends within the job-crafting literature ends with a set of recommendations for how future research on job crafting could progress and create scientific impact for the coming years.

The purpose of this qualitative exploratory study was to investigate the capacity of job crafting to serve as a viable response to abusive supervision. Although considerable literature has emerged on employee reactions to abusive supervision, the role of job crafting as a coping mechanism has received relatively little attention.

Using qualitative exploration, we conducted semi-structured interviews to examine how individuals engage in job crafting as a means to respond to or cope with abusive supervision. Critical Incident Interview Technique (CIIT) was used to obtain in-depth details of this topic. We analyzed the interview-based data using the thematic analysis (TA) technique. We also integrated topic modeling to cluster the identified categories of job crafting behaviors within our TA. The cultural context of our findings was further analyzed using interpretive phenological analysis (IPA).

The results of our thematic analysis led to four recurring themes in the interview-data: (1) Job crafting as a viable coping response to abusive supervision; (2) The type of coping relates to the type of crafting: Approach and Avoidance; (3) The role of perceived control; (4) Emotions play a role in the type of crafting employed. Findings from our IPA generated the following super-ordinate themes. (1) Job crafting fluidity, (2) effectiveness of job crafting, (3) resilience and (4) cultural dynamics.

This research reveals the ways in which individuals may turn to job crafting behaviors as a means to cope following instances of abusive supervision. Given the qualitative exploration of our research approach, we identify generalizability to be an issue.

Job crafting is a proactive phenomenon that equips employees with coping abilities in the workplace. While Wrzesniewski and Dutton (2001) suggested that job crafting behaviors tend to be hidden from management, there may be merit in organizations explicitly acknowledging the benefits of allowing employees to be active agents in their work, capable of using multiple domains of job crafting to improve their personal and professional lives (Petrou et al., 2017).

The current research reveals the ways in which individuals may turn to job crafting behaviors as a means to cope, following instances of abusive supervision. We further fine-grained our analysis to explicate employee job crafting behaviors in response to abusive supervision within a cross-cultural domain.

The purpose of this mixed-methods study is to examine the motivational determinants and contextual antecedents of individual job crafting behaviors.

The current research uses the mixed-methods design to elucidate the relationship between career outcome expectations and different forms of job crafting through external regulation. In Study 1, surveys were collected and analyzed from 151 employees across occupations and ranks using purposeful sampling approach. In Study 2, interview data were thematically analyzed to add complementarity and completeness to the findings.

In Study 1 (n = 151), a direct relationship between career outcome expectations and different forms of job crafting was established. Mediation analysis indicated an indirect relationship between career outcome expectations and approach crafting through external-social regulation. The authors found support for the accentuating role of turnover intentions on career outcome expectations and external social and material regulations. In Study 2 (n = 25), a thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews confirmed that when employees experience unfulfilled career expectations, employees attempt to realign the work situations. Such expectations may be tied to various forms of work-related external regulations and may lead to job crafting behaviors. The individuals depicted these behaviors while experiencing turnover intentions.

The current study brings together literature from job design, motivation and careers to consider the role of career expectations and external regulation in predicting job crafting behaviors. Taken together, the findings unearth the cognitive and contextual antecedents of job crafting.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the mechanism through which stressors influence job crafting. Based on regulatory focus theory, this study explores the mediating role of work regulatory focus between the challenge-hindrance stressors and approach-avoidance job crafting and the moderating role of trait regulatory focus.

The authors collected survey data in a northwestern city of China from 578 employees working in the finance, real estate and IT industries. Results were analyzed using Mplus 7.

The results reveal that challenge stressors have a positive effect on both approach job crafting (i.e. increasing structural job resources, increasing social job resources and increasing challenging job demands) and avoidance job crafting (i.e. decreasing hindering job demands) via work promotion focus. On the other hand, hindrance stressors have a positive effect on only avoidance job crafting via work prevention focus. In addition, trait promotion focus accentuates the influence of challenge-hindrance stressors on work regulatory focus, as well as the indirect effect of challenge-hindrance stressors on approach-avoidance job crafting respectively. Trait prevention focus only weakens the influence of challenge stressors on work promotion focus.

This study unfolds how stressors relate to job crafting. However, the cross-sectional design may limit the causal inferences.

This study provides new insight into the relationship between stressors and job crafting by explicating the motivational mechanism and boundary conditions.

The current study inspects pathways through which job crafting relates to the quality of employees' working lives. To date, this has been mostly done either by linking job crafting to individual job characteristics or by investigating its association with separate aspects of occupational well-being (such as work engagement), whereas empirical evidence about how it may affect one's overall work situation remains scarce.

To address this question, the authors conducted latent profile analyses based on selected job resources and job demands, which allowed the authors to derive distinct work environment patterns prevailing in a heterogeneous sample of 1,064 employees. Four patterns were identified denoting a passive, high-strain, low-strain and optimally balanced work environment types. The authors then tested the hypothesis that job crafting would relate to employees' odds of exposure to these patterns and that the latter would differentiate between high and low work engagement.

Approach job crafting was related to higher odds of being exposed to a favourably balanced work environment, and the reverse was true of avoidance crafting. Work engagement differed as a function of the quality of the work environment. Furthermore, the results suggested a potentially indirect link between approach job crafting and work engagement via exposure to different work environment types, whereas avoidance crafting related to lower work engagement only directly.

The findings contribute to theory testing and practice by providing a holistic representation of the work environment and then interlinking its features with employee proactivity and engagement.

The purpose of this study was to explore school principals’ job crafting profiles during the prolonged COVID-19 crisis in 2021, and investigate profile differences regarding principals’ own perceived servant leadership, stress and work meaningfulness.

Using latent profile analysis (LPA), two job crafting profiles were identified: (1) active crafters (55%) and (2) average crafters (45%). By auxiliary measurement-error-weighted-method (BCH), we examined whether and how job crafting profiles differed in terms of servant leadership, stress and work meaningfulness.

Active crafters reported higher than the overall mean level of approach-oriented job crafting (increasing job resources and demands), whereas average crafters reported an overall mean level of approach-oriented job crafting. Avoidance-oriented job crafting by decreasing hindering job demands did not differentiate the two profiles. Active crafters reported significantly higher servant leadership behavior, stress and work meaningfulness than average crafters.

Study findings provide new knowledge and reflect the implications that the unprecedented pandemic had for education. This study contributes to the existing literature within the scholarship of job crafting through empirical research during the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic. For practitioners, these study findings reflect contextual constraints, organizational processes and culture, and leadership in workplaces.